The last days I’ve been reading the blog of the Dutch crown prince, Willem-Alexander, also Prince of Orange. Willem-Alexander blogged about the trip to Antarctica he and Máxima made. In his first post, after they started in the beautiful Torres del Paine park in Chili, he writes:
(…) Al hoewel het niet mijn bedoeling is een toeristisch reisverslag te schrijven maar mij te concentreren op (…) onderzoek (…) kan ik het toch niet nalaten dit park aan te raden!
In Dutch he says that he is going to blog about research done on Antarctica and not a writing a tourist blog, although he cannot fail to recommend this Torres del Paine park.
What is interesting is that the rest of the blog is a pleasure to read I think. It is of course about this goal they had, getting to know the research done there. But more than just ‘in between the lines’ he tells about Antarctica and what they experience there. And I’ve never been into the Dutch royal family that much, but I really liked reading it, sad it only lasted for four days / posts.
What I also noticed is that he didn’t had any pictures in the blog which I hardly could understand. But after some looking around they were in a seperate photo gallery. What was more interesting is that this seems to be maintained by other people as the captions read, i.e. ‘De Prins van Oranje kijkt door een microscoop’ (’The Prince of Orange looks through a microscoop’) whereas the posts are signed by ‘Willem-Alexander’. I thought about the security-card system here at Mälardalen högskola, we’re not allowed in all parts of the university, only in the departments were our courses are, not in the staff corridors, etc. Which really conflicts with the general atmosphere, and in particulary the relationship between students and teachers, which is very informal.
Systems not really adapted to the people inside.
Tags: blog, conflict, interaction, netherlands, power distance, traveling
Categories: a cultural journey, an intellectual journey
